Leaving Sicily

Hello all!

Thursday afternoon/evening (3/8/12), it was decided that we would be leaving Sicily early due to an incoming storm. We decided to leave on Friday afternoon instead of taking the chance of

being stuck in Sicily until Monday or later.

So Friday morning we woke and packed up the rest of our belongings as well as all the robot stuff and headed to the Ferry that would take us back to Malta. It was about a 4 hour bus ride, but we stopped at a small mall and had lunch and Gelato!

We arrived at our destinatio

n with all of our stuff about an hour and a half before the ferry arrived.

Being dropped off at an empty dock we did wh

at all good, patient tourists do, we played frisbee. Erik supplied a flexible, neon green frisbee and we all took a turn determining how hard it really was to throw and catch a frisbee in the wind. Tim was by far the greatest by playing while carrying all of his luggage.

After a while, a nice man from security informed us that we needed to be on the other side of the dock to check in on foot. We carried all the robotic equipment and our luggage over to the other side and then proceeded to check in and wait inside a small building fo

r the ferry.

On the ferry ride, Tim, Tyler, Billy and Erik played multiple intense games of hearts, while Zoe, Jeff, Brent and I talked about as many topics as we could think of and Jane got hooked into her book on Malta during WWII.

Once in Malta's harbor the ferry took quite a while to dock due to increase speeds in wind. We waited, quite patiently, for a tugboat and proceeded to exit once docked.

Skipping ahead, we checked into our hotel (the Imperial Hotel) and got situated. Jane, Tyler, Brent, Tim, Billy and I went out for a quick dinner at a local cafe/restaurant and the rest went straight to bed. There were really strong winds all night, hints to the impending storm and we are really interested to see the storm as it passes over Malta!

Until later!

Sicily Cistern Update

Today we visited two sites. The first was a simple well and the second was a more extensive water gallery.

The well was in the middle of a small town square, known as a Baglio. A Baglio such as the one we visited is a group of houses that has been organized to prioritize defense of people, water, produce, and any other stored resources. There is one entrance to the neighborhood, and the walls and buildings are quite tall -- the ground floor was typically used for storage, and people lived on the top 2 floors. (We also learned that Baglios on the coast have a somewhat different organization, and were created to protect materials for trade, such as wine and oil.)

 Unfortunately, a number of modern pumps had been installed in the top of the well. These made it difficult to drop the ROV into the water, but we still managed it successfully. The well turned out to be a simple rectangle, which only required one sonar scan to map.





Toto was kind enough to point out a few historical land marks around the site. These included the outline of an ancient stone archway, other old stone walls, and a date marker.




The second site was in the basement of a modern hotel that is a restored paper factory, originally founded in the 1700s: the Hotel Baglio Conca D'Oro at Cartiera Grande (http://www.hotelbaglioconcadoro.com/).

We used an opening in the kitchen’s basement to access a small rectangular chamber that was connected to other chambers by small tunnels. The first tunnel was very long, and we ran out of cable before we reached the end of it. The second tunnel might have been equally long, but a few meters in, it narrowed in width preventing the ROV and us from continued exploration. We will return to this site tomorrow and access the waterways from another point.

ROV Deployment and Technical Update

Yesterday was very exciting as we got to go out to a local site in Carini (in the province of Palermo, Sicily) and drive the ROV in two different cisterns. The first site was called Case di Cuetitta and the second was small enough that it didn't have an actual name, but it was also very cool. During the first drive of the ROV I cataloged the location of the cistern through lots of photographs and in the second cistern, I was able to get a sonar scan! it was very interesting and fun to learn about the history of the two sites and to be able to really see the outputted sonar and video scans of both cisterns!

As for my project, I am currently uploading files to complete the website's special actions. Also, Keith, a Maltese archeologist with us, has agreed to do an interview with me about his position on water and society and the importance of cisterns in Malta! So by tonight I hope to have the website files uploaded and good to go and an interview from Keith!

Sicily Cisterns

Sunday morning we woke up quite early (~4:30am) and packed up the apartment to jump on a ferry headed for Sicily along with Keith, a friend and colleague of Timmy Gambin's, who is studying archaeology for his PhD at the University of Malta. The ferry ride was an hour and a half long and rocked us all to sleep, well at least some of us. The ferry landed in Pozzallo and then we took a 4hr bus ride to Carini (in the province of Palermo, Sicily) on the north western side of the island where we are staying at a hotel.

Upon arriving to the site, we unpacked our luggage and then attended a lecture from Keith about water management in Malta and also how it compares to Sicily. This directly ties into our work with cistern mapping and visualization. After the lecture, we got dinner and then ran through a system check to verify all the equipment was working. We ran into some problems when verifying sonar operation; however, during deployment, the sonar decided to behave and provide beautiful sonar scans.

We are scheduled to visit several different cisterns here, which were setup through Timmy (our awesome Maltese contact). So far, we visited 2 cisterns. The location we visited today (Tuesday) is known as Case Cutietta and is located in Carini itself. The location was originally a basilica and is now privately owned. This site is of special interest because 5 years ago during excavation, a mosaicked floor was recovered from the original basilica. The archeologist suspect that the cistern we explored also contains a mosaicked floor as it probably was a Roman room. We deployed the robot and collected sonar scans, and video, but did not find any evidence of a mosaicked floor due to much dirt and debris. The shape of the cistern is rectangular as seen to the right.


Overall, our experience here in Sicily has been great. Besides all the great programming the team has been doing and the field work we experienced today, we still have been able to stroll along the beach and get a whiff of fresh air as well as experience a very evident Italian culture. Keith has been very gracious through providing extensive knowledge about Sicily and the different sites. We have also been relying on him for his translation abilities :)

Tech Update

It's been a busy week here. Yesterday we packed up early in the morning and took a ferry from Valletta, Malta to Pachino, Sicily. From there we hopped a few buses and took a beautiful ride through the country, passing by the world's most active volcano (Mount Etna) along the way. We reached our hotel in Carini (in the province of Palermo, Sicily) in the afternoon and got situated for deployment. Billy will talk about that, so I will cover the other things that have been going on. Despite the nagging fatigue that we are all feeling, there have been some really great project improvements. Since these will also be addressed in similar blog posts, I will give a little update on mine: the archaeologist graphical interface.

I have already put together a majority of the framework for the interface, and recently began loading in cistern meshes. Due to the fact that Billy and Jeff have their code complete (aside from per-cistern fine tuning), the three of us can pump out a cistern model and have it online in about an hour. We will be doing this for each new cistern that we deploy the robot into. My project is still running into some choppiness which will be sorted out in 2-3 days.

Here is a sample of my progress as of today.

Note: If you are running Linux, you may run into difficulty with the Unity3D plugin.

I am still working on the textures/lighting of the cistern and water, the spherical linear interpolation of the rotational trackball (should be a quick fix!), and the photo selection on the right hand side of the interface. It may not be very easy to see, but right now all that the photo selection does is highlight a region on the wall that the selected picture shows. Once the photo selection is complete the model will rotate so that the highlighted area that the picture displays will be more visible and a frustrum with the robot's position and angle of view will be shown. I also intend to use Tim's higher quality go-pro pictures, rather than these stills from the video stream from last year. I might end up adding a big pop-up version of the photo as well. We'll see what happens. Aside from that, it's time to start rapidly uploading and spitting out cisterns as we deploy into them!